Growth of wireless communication networks generally results in deployment of infrastructure that is primarily market based. Disparate markets have disparate service needs—e.g., metropolitan areas can have dramatically different service requirements than rural areas—and thus a telecommunication network can have a heterogeneous, location-specific telecommunication network that spans various radio technologies and services. In addition, as radio technologies advance, services provided wirelessly can rely on non-mobile networks, which further increases infrastructure heterogeneity of the telecommunication network. Moreover, as wireless communication becomes ubiquitous, subscriber mobility results in consumption of services and associated network data across a range of network systems and capabilities. Accordingly, reliable and efficient access to network data is a key component to perceived quality of service by subscribers and customer retention.
Data caching, or temporary storage of information in a computer memory, is a common mechanism to improve performance of a computing device by avoiding (i) time-consuming input/output (I/O) operation(s) to extract the information from a repository, typically different from the computer memory, or (ii) costly or inefficient reproduction, such as re-computation, of the information. Thus, data caching can be readily employed in various components of a wireless network. Yet, conventional implementations of data caching typically operate in a specific portions of network infrastructure and are application specific. Such features of typical data caching, the heterogeneous nature of wireless network deployments, and a dramatic mobility of a large segment of subscribers generally result in modest to negligible performance improvements to data access in current wireless networks.